Robertson: Financial concerns drive McLane's decisions

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, October 14, 2001

A deflated Drayton McLane Jr. returned home this weekend to confront the obvious. The Astros might be one of baseball's better franchises, ranking among the top four in regular-season victories since McLane's first full season of ownership, but they remain a long way from being the champions he expects.

Their recent successes, although impressive relative to what the team's owners before him accomplished, have been small potatoes, confined to dominating the Central Division of the National League. Like everybody in Houston, McLane wants more. He's a fiercely competitive man, his corn pone, "Hi, how ya doin' " persona notwithstanding. And unlike the rest of us, he can make decisions that will impact the Astros' fate.

One of the key ones has come down. If they are going to advance further into the playoffs than the first round next season, they'll have to do it with essentially the same budget that got them there in 2001.

Among postseason qualifiers, the Astros had the smallest payroll of the four NL teams and ranked above only Oakland in the AL. The Athletics are such off-the-charts, bargain-basement brutes, earning roughly $35 million to the Yankees' $115 million, they make McLane look like a wasteful spendthrift.

The Astros received beaucoup bang for their modest 62 million bucks, all things considered. But nobody wants to hear that now in the wake of their three-and-out flameout against the inferior Braves -- Drayton included.

That leads to the second crucial decision confronting the boss: to fire Larry Dierker or extend his contract beyond 2002.

McLane is all bottom line, and the fiscal bottom line outweighs the physical one for him. He will make his call on the manager based on his marketing hunches. If he decides Dierker will hinder his ability to sell tickets -- and some say he has reached that conclusion after the firestorm of criticism directed at Dierk over the last two weeks -- the skipper is a goner.

That doesn't mean he deserves to be fired, because he doesn't based on empirical evidence. No manager before Dierker had won four division championships in his first five seasons at the helm, and he accomplished same despite considerable adversity plus the aforementioned cash constraints.

But those titles won't necessarily save him, any more than Mike Hargrove's many AL Central titles did when Cleveland concluded, fairly or unfairly, that it needed a fresh voice in the dugout.

Dierker has been the most successful manager in Astros history. The question is, has he been blessed with enough talent, inadvertently or by design, to have been more successful? Clearly, two of his teams -- 1998's and the current one -- had sufficient muscle to represent the National League in the World Series.

A near-parallel case is the Braves, so frequently the bane of the Astros' existence yet notorious underachievers in their own right at a higher level. But few have called for taking the ax to Bobby Cox for having won only one World Series in the 10 seasons he has been winning division titles with one of the game's fattest payrolls.

If McLane pulls the plug (you wonder how Saturday's Baylor-Nebraska score -- Cornhuskers 48-7 -- will impact his humor), he will say it's because the Astros need a more animated leader and/or because the negative clamor from you folks who spin the turnstiles dictates it's time for a change. Remember, for a salesman like McLane, the customer is always right.

Dierker, who is defiantly honest to a fault, damages his cause by refusing to be politically correct. He's the Bill Maher of managers. He routinely criticizes his players to the media -- note his saying he was "dumbfounded" by the home run pitch Shane Reynolds threw to that unlikeliest of Braves heroes, Paul Bako, on Friday -- and he openly expressed his displeasure with the Enron Field crowds during the Barry Bonds circus for cheering Bonds while booing the faltering Astros.

Dierker's out-of-character petulance toward the media after the Game 1 Division Series defeat also went down poorly with McLane, although the emerging threat to his job security, caused by the Astros' faltering finish and exacerbated by the Bonds matter, no doubt contributed to his responding to perfectly valid questions from reporters with churlish, sarcastic answers.

McLane's yea-or-nay call on Dierker has its own bottom-line implications. His salary is well south of a million, making him grossly underpaid by his peers' standards. Unless McLane hires another unproven type -- both his choices, Terry Collins and Dierker, have been -- it will cost him pretty pennies galore to change managers.

Ironically, in light of McLane's hold-the-line-on-spending policies, his bringing in, say, the well-respected Felipe Alou would seem to negate the Astros' chances of so much as contemplating keeping Alou's son, Moises.

We get what we pay for, we're told. But McLane has gotten more than that from the Astros. Even if he -- and a host of others -- believes it hasn't been enough.